Theologizing Friendship - Nathan Sumner Lefler

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respective theological approaches. As Jean Leclercq warns repeatedly in The Love of Learning, the commerce between monastery and school, if erratic and occasionally contentious, was not slight. Thus, we know, for example, that by the ninth century, abbots were sending a few of their monks to the town schools to be educated,132 while schoolmen sometimes left the world permanently to become monks.133 And lest we suppose that Aelred, at least, at the far reaches of civilized Europe, must have lived in splendid monachistic isolation, C. H. Talbot observes that

      for the greater part of his twenty years in office at Rievaulx he was a constant visitor to France and must have been aware of the controversies in which Saint Bernard was involved. The possibility that he may have met on these occasions John of Salisbury, Robert Pullus and Robert of Melun cannot be ruled out.134

      In short, though the differences between the monastic and scholastic milieux in our period are real and significant, we must be alert not to envision too radical a cultural or ideological partition between the two. The distance between medieval monastery and school is by no means negligible, but it is probably far smaller than the distance between either of these institutions and its twenty-first century counterpart.

      Why Their Accounts of Friendship?

      Regarding our final important question—Why these two theologians’ accounts of friendship?—a few comments are in order. R. W. Southern’s acute analysis of the respective roles of the monasteries and schools in the twelfth-century renaissance provides a useful point of departure. Southern believes the period from 1100 to 1320 “to have been one of the greatest ages of humanism in the history of Europe.”135 The change that marks the beginning of this period “took the form of a greater concentration on man and on human experience as a means of knowing God.”136 But

      if self-knowledge is the first step in the rehabilitation of man, friendship—which is the sharing of this knowledge with someone else—is an important auxiliary. This was understood by the humanists of the Renaissance; but the discovery was made in the monasteries of the late 11th century.137

      Moreover, “the experience of friendship lay along the road to God. . . . So here again we start with nature and end with God.”138 In fact, “of all the forms of friendship rediscovered in the twelfth century, there was none more eagerly sought than the friendship between God and man.”139 Such influential monastic thinkers as St. Anselm, St. Bernard and St. Aelred helped to realize this theological and spiritual epiphany. Popularly, too, for a multitude of reasons difficult to isolate one from the other, Christian piety and thought began to shift in focus from averting and appeasing God’s anger, to relating to God as a friend. Southern notes the plethora of prayers and poems from this time onward dominated by the theme of “the humanity of God.”140 He makes as well the astute and original point that the “sentimentality” of much of this poetry is itself an expression and form of “humanism in religion”—a form “that has survived all the religious divisions of Europe. . . . Popular piety has never lost this sentimental familiarity.”141 Indeed, “The greatest triumph of medieval humanism was to make God seem human. The Ruler of the Universe, who had seemed so terrifying and remote, took on the appearance of a familiar friend.”142

      If the monasteries rediscovered friendship and gradually cultivated the revolutionary notion of a friendly God, then the complementary scholastic feat was, according to Southern,

      to make the universe itself friendly, familiar, and intelligible. This is an essential part of the heritage of western Europe which we owe to the scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The experience of earlier centuries had suggested that so far as man could see, the universe was a scene of chaos and mystery, and that renunciation, submission to the supernatural, and a grateful acceptance of miraculous aid were the best that men could aim at. But in the late eleventh century, secular schools began to multiply which were dedicated to the task of extending the area of intelligibility and order in the world in a systematic way. . . .

      The importance of these schools for the intellectual development of Europe is very great. They provided permanent centres of learning which faced the world instead of facing away from it.143

      Friendliness, then, was everywhere, it seems, in the period spanning the birth of St. Aelred and the death of St. Thomas, on both the theological and the cosmological scenes, and in a way that it had probably never been before. It was therefore inevitable that friendship should become a conscious part of theological discussion in both monastic and scholastic settings. We should reasonably expect to find many of the underlying differences discussed in this chapter reflected in the two theologians’ accounts of friendship, and we will not be disappointed. A more elusive, and surprising discovery is that the different ways Aelred and Thomas engage the topic of friendship have significant implications for the approaches to theology per se engaged by their respective institutions.

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